The only thing worse than eight hours in a car with a whiny kid who's watching DVDs is eight hours in a car with a whiny kid and a DVD player that doesn't work. That's what I was faced with on Wednesday morning, as we prepared to embark on our trek to the land of Tornadoes and Toto and Grandma Dorothy. I plugged the DVD cord into the car socket (that strange little hole in the dashboard once known as a cigarette lighter). Nothing happened.
Gasp. Wheeze. Shriek.
I fiddled and twisted and plugged and unplugged it any number of times. Still, nothing happened. We checked to see whether we had a player malfunction, by plugging it into the Avalon. Lights and sirens, bells and whistles, holy technology Batman! We had diagnosed the problem.
Sort of.
I thought for a moment about unpacking my Civic and repacking in the other car, but I decided against it because I didn't want to spend the extra gas money, I wasn't thrilled about driving hundreds of miles alone with a kid in an 11-year-old car, and mostly I thought it would be super-duper fun to sit in the Honda service waiting area for 2 hours with a dog in a crate and a bored preschooler, while they installed a new socket (after telling us in a roundabout way that the jackasses who did the body work after my wreck somehow managed to pull out the old one and tried to fool me by supergluing it back in -- quite unsuccessfully, it seems).
Anyway, that's just what we did. I tried to make up a bit of time by refusing to stop for anything short of a backseat bladder catastrophe or severe dehydration and/or starvation. We made it to my folks' house by 5 p.m., all three of us (me, little dude, and dog) doing the gotta-go dance straight from the car to the bathroom facility of choice.
I may be a horrid parent, plopping my kid in front of videos for eight hours straight (plus the two hours during which he was subjected to Diane Sawyer and a Dancing with the Stars elimination recap on Good Morning America in the waiting area), plying him with gummy snacks and Happy Meals throughout. I admit it. I'm awful. I'm one of those parents I swore I'd never be.
But we made it there and back, safe and sane.
So hooray for Honda, squeezing me in on a moment's notice. And I heap bushels of praise upon the person who invented the portable DVD. That genius deserves a raise.
(The knucklehead who thought it was a great idea to glue in my broken socket as though it were meant to be that way, slightly crooked and without one bit of voltage, owes me $88.73.)
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